Anyone who lifts knows how much it sucks to stay natty. Like for real I can bench press 100 kilos for 5 reps but it took me like 10 years of lifting weights on an off to get there. Feelsbadman when u compare urself to the tiktok sarm goblins and realize u could have a 405 bench by now if u just blasted off years ago. Oh well tho. I want to blast off so bad I just don’t have the money for it right now.
I'm gonna respectfully disagree here. 100 Kilo bench is stronger than 90% of all humans walking around.
https://www.muscleandstrength.com/articles/strong-strength-standards-raw-natural-lifters
This is a good article that puts strength levels into perspective. And people on PEDs gain more muscle just sitting on the couch, than natties actually working out... That 15% to strength performance is if the lean bodyweight remains the same. PEDs allow you to slap muscle on to your frame which means that 10-15% is now based on the extra muscle that they have.
So yeah, drugs increase hypertrophy more than strength, but each pound of muscle pushes that 10-15% further away from their natty counterparts..
Anything people engage in you'll be better than those that don't if you are the bloodiest of beginner rockclimbers you'll still be better than all the people that don't rockclimb so just by being able to go up a wall you'll be better than 99% of all people, but that's not how those things are measured whenever you engage in a thing it's better to compare yourself to those that also engage in that activity, that can be sports, hobbies etc.
As for the people on PEDs gaining muscle on the couch it's literally the placebo effect, there's literally a study from 1974 where they told some student athletes "Hey we are going to give you legal steroids" gave them placebos and they even so still saw increases in strength pretty massive increases as well.
In just 4 weeks, they put a combined total of ~100 pounds on those same four lifts. 100 pounds instead of 22, in 4 weeks instead of 7. Simply because they THOUGHT they were on steroids.
They did this study again in 2000 with national powerlifters and guess what, when they maxed, thinking they were on steroids, every single one of them hit PRs on every lift. The smallest PR on any lift was 5kg. Most were 10 or 12.5kg PRs. These PRs represented 4-5% improvements on their maxes.
This is pretty well understood and and I can cite more stuff if you want but I'd rather watch GDQ than argue broscience if I'm being honest.
It's not broscience..
Placebo works on strength, sure. Mentally you can gain some by just being dialed in and we know this. But I'm talking about the study where they literally sat on their ass, got injected with exogenous hormones, and gained more muscle than naturals who actually trained.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101
No amount of placebo is going to gain you muscle with NO exercise whatsoever. But testosterone does that quite handily...
When boys go through puberty, they gain muscle size and bone JUST by hormones, whether they exercise or not...it's obvious that an increase in testosterone will grow muscle even if you do nothing else..
Drugs + Exercise > Drugs only > Natural + exercise > Natural and doing nothing....
No amount of placebo is going to get you within 85% of the muscle of Ronnie Coleman or Phil Heath or whoever is Mr. Olympia now. Sorry, drugs increase muscle growth to a large degree, and the more muscle you have, the more your potential strength and speed. That's why athletes and even non-athletes use them.
i.e. the study we did was using untrained men, which surprise is almost always the root of broscience, guess what using untrained people is always useless you can literally tell people to sit on a couch thinking about working out and they'll gain muscle , again I plead to you stop spouting broscience stop just going on weird rants, stop trying to think I'm saying things I don't really say.
Guess what even with steroids you or me are not going to be a Ronnie Coleman or Phil Heath because their genetics for building muscle are just abnormal, even if I took steroids and an olympic weightlifter didn't they'd still be stronger than me, because those people are a .1% of the population.
My point and it's the same point still is that since we know that PEDs can cause an performance increase of 10-15% when comparing olypmic athletes we can reasonably guess that it's similar between gym guy #1 and gym guy #2 meaning taking steroids is not going to get you from benching 100kg to benching 180kg it's just not gonna happen.
Again this thread pisses me off because there's a lot of broscience being said and people just go for what sounds right and in turn encourage either not trying hard, ruining their body by going on test to achieve something that's easily achievable without any PEDs or ruining their body and not even getting anything out of it because they just think "yeah it's fine I just need the right stack" then doing even stupider shit like DBol because it didn't work the first time.